This is not about chasing trends — we are being left behind here, and it is an existential threat to the success of the mission itself.
It’s wild to see how everyone successfully clocked crypto as a scam but then immediately applied the same “NGMI” FOMO mindset to the next scam.
Don’t get me wrong. LLMs are useful for several important software engineering functions: prototyping, iterating on implementations, collecting supplementary data, lining up disjoint interfaces… but it makes a terrible foundation, and it can’t refactor beyond a 101 level.
The only reason the industry is able to pretend that synthetic text extrusion is a sustainable replacement for granular human discernment is because most of our economy is just about building a marketable scam and leaving someone else to hold the bag. If company decision-makers knew they might face any consequences at all for steering the ship into a tar pit, this mass psychosis would not be possible.
Edit:
Also, this…
LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster.
…is precisely Cory Doctorow’s point about reverse centaurs, and the difference between labor and capital when it comes to deploying new tools. I don’t think they even realize they’re putting the quiet part in bold.